FOX Sports Racing

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Vroom-vroom, big fella!

By Levi Buchanan

FOX Sports Racing attempts to bring the fury of a professional stock car race to your itty-bitty handset, but does that 3G in your palm have the horsepower to handle the juice? Will this latest sports offering from Sorret make it to the winner's circle, or does it need more time in the pits?

Features:

Five tracks of varying difficulty

Three race modes: Practice, Race, Online

Uses Sorrent's Mobile Persona tech

Racing has been one of the hardest genres to nail on a handset. Previous efforts have failed because of either shoddy control or they fail to deliver a sense of speed. Well, while FOX Sports Racing is the best racer we've played on a handset so far, it's still not the silver bullet that conquers the squirrelly genre.

FOX Sports Racing does a lot right, without question. The track selection is superb with five unique courses that cruise through different landscapes like city, mountain, and tropical. There's a even a swing through Vega$, and that always scores bonus points. Each track feels wildly different from the others, meaning n two races feel exactly the same.

The other cars on the track are brained by well-done AI. No cheesy rubberband junk that slingshots the weakest racer to the front of the pack at the last minute. And while rubbin' is indeed racin', they also don't play crash n' bash in the middle of a race. Sure, you might encounter an aggressive driver, but none of them will try to deliberately run you into the grass. They'll just try to draft off your rear-end and squeeze you out on a tight turn.

FOX Sports Racing unfolds in the first-person view, like most of Sorrent's games. In the driver's seat, you'll get a full display of the racng action ahead of you, but a number of handy features and meters take up real estate, too. You'll always have a handle on your speed, position, lap time, and fuel level. There's also a draft meter that helps you guage the best spot to trail a car until the opportunity for a humbling pass presents itself.

It ain't racing without a pit stop, and if you want to win the day, you'll need to pit intelligently. Once in, pit crew members will feverishly replace and warm-up tires, refuel your ride, and make necessary repairs. The animations are clever, and while the little digital buggers peel off those lug nuts fast, you'll always grumble at them for not doing it faster.

FOX Sports Racing also utilizes Sorrent's Mobile Persona tech, meaning you can hop online with your celly and challenge another buddy to a race. Road rage is much better spent in this mode, than on the actual highway. The more you race with your MP, they more skill oints you'll earn for goosing your character.

The sights and sounds of FOX Sports Racing aren't too shabby either. The racing action is fairly fluid, but Sorrent will always get a grin with their great car-flipping animations. After all, that's the whole reason some people actually watch races: the crashes. The cracked windshield effect, howveer, doesn't work as well. Let's face it, we aren't working off that big of a screen as it is. Throwing a biggity crack across the screen doesn't help.

Now the bad news: Even though the speedometer says you're going 170mph, you sure don't feel like it. FOX Sports Racing is no grandma, but it still doesn't have enough get-up-and-go for a racing game. The action just never gets as furious as it should. And the motor sounds aren't very convincing, either. Is that a stock car engine or a moped? The control also suffers. Racing games need dedicated buttons for accelrate and break, and those cannot be so close to each other. Turning feels loose and floaty, too. Sigh.

The Verdict

No matter how flashy it looks, there¿s just no way around the fact that Racing just never gets your blood pumping. The sense of speed is, well, senseless, and the control feels a little too floaty for my taste. FOX Sports is a good game, but it¿s still the runt of the litter. Basketball and Boxing offer far better thrills for your dollar.